privacy

What infrastructure is needed for positively disruptive technology?

Cosponsored by Disruptive Technologists

and the New York Chapter of the Federal Communications Bar Association

Infrastructure in this sense could be physical (fiber in the ground) – or open source software, legal/policy, etc. – more broadly any type of support structure.

This will be the beginning of ongoing initiatives to address the issues raised and follow with hackathons afterwards. A major component will be the development of standards and protocols for new Net-connected technologies with consideration of the social and ethical issues as machines become intelligent. We’ll also explore innovative funding methods for these projects using digital currencies.

David Solomonoff, President, Internet Society of New York

November 11, 2014

Brooklyn Law School

Fell Hall, 205 State Street, Brooklyn, New York

10:00 am to 8:00 pm

Admission: $20.00

Students with valid ID admitted free of charge

RSVP here

Zephyr Teachout, New York gubernatorial candidate, organizer, educator, and scholar

Teachout is a constitutional and property law professor at Fordham Law School. She is a deeply experienced leader in the fights for economic and political equality and against concentration of wealth and control in the hands of the few. She is one of the leading legal experts on corruption.

Timothy Karr, Senior Director of Strategy, Free Press

Timothy builds on Free Press’ grassroots and policy work to promote universal access to open networks and protect free speech everywhere. Before joining Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and as vice president of Globalvision New Media. He has also worked extensively as an editor, reporter and photojournalist for the Associated Press, Time, Inc., the New York Times and Australia Consolidated Press. Tim critiques, analyzes and reports on media and media policy for the Huffington Post.

Serene Han, Ideas Engineer, Google

Technological initiatives to help people confront threats in the face of conflict, instability, and repression

Dave Burstein, publisher, DSL Prime:

Wireless Engineers predict 50x improvement in capacity; How do we make it so?

Spectrum should be WiFi and less licensed. WiFi wiil do more and more, becoming increasingly crowded. Mobile carriers, using existing spectrum, can increase their capacity using MIMO and more with little or no increase in capex. Logical policy: All newly available spectrum go to WiFi/unlicensed.

Bob Frankston, Ambient Connectivity – merging wired and wireless telecom infrastructures

Co-creator with Dan Bricklin of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program and the co-founder of Software Arts, the company that developed it. In recent years, Frankston has been an outspoken advocate for reducing the role of telecommunications companies in the evolution of the internet, particularly with respect to broadband and mobile communications. (remote)

Sander Rabin:  Neurosecurity, National Security and Cognitive Liberty

Sander Rabin, a physician-attorney, is the executive director of The Center for Transhuman Jurisprudence, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is education in human enhancement and the development of policies and model rules of law for human enhancement that protect our rights to our minds, bodies and genomes, while minimizing human enhancement’s potential for divisiveness and harm.

Nate Heasley, Executive Director, Goodnik

Goodnik has developed a labor-backed digital currency for information workers to share resources with non-profits and for-profit companies with a social mission.

Nate has been working as a manager of and consultant to  non-profit and technology related companies for 20 years. Nate also founded GrassrootsCamp, an organization that provides free training seminars to non-profit organizations and social entrepreneurs. It is from that experience that Goodnik started as a way to broaden the impact of those events and ideas from that community. Nate holds a BA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law where he was a Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights and a Stein Scholar for Public Interest Law and Ethics.

Jim Dutcher, CIO, State University of New York, Cobleskill

How broadband is transforming rural America and what is needed now

Panel: Bitcoin and related cryptocurrency-related technologies

• Margaux Avedison, Moderator. Co-founder of EvotionMedia, a “Crypto-Media” production and finance entity. She is on the advisory board of the Bitcoin Shop and organized the first Bitcoin Education Day on Capitol Hill as an Advisor for the Chamber of Digital Commerce.She also consults for banks, individuals, large corporations and venture capitalists on Bitcoin and Blockchain 2.0 technology.  She is an early entrepreneur in the digital currency space and relaunched the first American Bitcoin Exchange, Tradehill, in 2012.

• Erik Anderson, Chairman, WC3 web payments group. Lead/Senior Software Engineer for much of Bloomberg’s Charting, Technical Analysis, Trading Strategies, Data Science, Interactive Data Visualization, Backtesting and Technical Analysis Screening, Core Graphics Infrastructure, math/Quants Developer, Financial Services

• Attorney Jeffrey Alberts, Partner in Pryor Cashman’s Litigation Group. Head of the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations Practice. Jeffrey’s practice focuses on government investigations and prosecutions and related regulatory proceedings, asset forfeiture and money laundering litigation, victims’ rights representation, and complex civil litigation. Jeffrey is an experienced trial lawyer who has served as lead counsel in numerous trials, including civil and criminal federal jury trials, state jury trials, and state and federal bench trials. Jeffrey has represented clients in disputes involving virtual currency. He also has been quoted by the media concerning criminal prosecutions of virtual currency service providers and government seizures of bitcoins. Immediately prior to joining the firm in 2013, Jeffrey spent six years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he investigated and prosecuted a wide variety of white collar criminal offenses, including money laundering, securities fraud, bank fraud, mail and wire fraud, and bankruptcy fraud.

• Adam Krellenstein, Co-founder Counterparty. Lead developer of counterpartyd; chief architect of the Counterparty Protocol. Counterparty is a free and open platform that puts powerful financial tools in the hands of everyone with an Internet connection. By harnessing the power of the Bitcoin network, Counterparty creates a robust and secure marketplace directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, extending Bitcoin’s functionality from a peer-to-peer payment network into a full fledged peer-to-peer financial platform.

  • Patrick Deegan CTO, ID3 Chief Architect. ID3 is developing a new social ecosystem of trusted, self-healing digital institutions. This endeavor seeks to address the severe structural limitations of existing institutions by empowering individuals to assert greater control over their data, online identities and authentication.

Panel: Hear Me, Touch Me, See Me, Feel Me: Moving Natural User Interface (NUI) to the Mainstream

This panel discussion will explore the world of NUI and what it will take to move today’s emerging NUI technologies (voice recognition, Kinect, haptics, facial recognition, etc.) into widespread adoption and make them accessible to all.

  • Deb Benkler, Moderator. Co-founder of NUI Central – NY, the largest NUI group on earth and is known as NYC’s leading NUI evangelist. She is a practitioner of lean and logical UX focusing on best practices in the broader context of CX (customer experience). In 2012, she won a User Experience Award for her work on the Maryland Transit Administration Interactive Maintenance Kiosk, which incorporated facial recognition.
  • Ken Lonyai Co-founder of NUI Central and is known as the other NYC leading NUI evangelist. He’s a 15+ year veteran of user centered interactive project development including some of the industry’s most unique experiential systems. His skills span the on-line world and nearly every realm of human/computer interface used by brands and retailers – mobile, interactive kiosks, experiential displays, etc. He is a User Experience Award winner.
  • David Melville is a Research Staff Member at IBM. He has worked in the area of semi-conductor fabrication and nano-technology, exploring meta-materials and techniques for optimizing illumination and patterning masks for photo-lithography processors before making a jump to developing visualization and interactivity solutions for smart-grid projects. Most recently, he has been exploring what it means to interact with learning systems and working to establish a new era of computing experience.
  • Sean Montgomery is head of hardware at Ringly, the first fashion ring to manage your mobile device. He’s an engineer, professor, and new-media artist in New York City. While finishing his Ph.D. in neuroscience, Sean began to consider the fact that from the perspective of a neuron inside the human brain, both a cold winter day and the embrace of a loved one feels like a sequence of electrical impulses. Sean co-founded SENSORSTAR Labs, an agile R&D consulting group in New York City.
  • Tanya Kraljic is a Principal Designer for Nuance’s mobility division. Her work focuses on the strategy and design of speech experiences in mobile, wearable, in-home, and other emerging technologies. Prior to joining Nuance in 2010, Tanya earned a PhD in cognitive psychology, with an emphasis on adaptation in interactive spoken dialog.

Internet Society Board of Trustees Calls on the Global Internet Community to Stand Together to Support Open Internet Access, Freedom, and Privacy

isocInternet Society Press Release

Internet Society Board of Trustees Calls on the Global Internet Community to Stand Together to Support Open Internet Access, Freedom, and Privacy

Fundamental ideals of the Internet are under threat

[Berlin, Germany, 4 August 2013] – The Internet Society Board of Trustees during its meeting in Berlin, Germany today called on the global Internet community to stand together in support of open Internet access, freedom, and privacy. Recently exposed information about government Internet surveillance programs is a wake-up call for Internet users everywhere – the fundamental ideals of the Internet are under threat.

The Internet Society Board of Trustees believes that government Internet surveillance programs create unacceptable risks for the future of a global, interoperable, and open Internet. Robert Hinden, Chair of the Board of Trustees, stated, “Berlin is a city where freedom triumphed over tyranny. Human and technological progress are not based on building walls, and we are confident that the human ideals of communication and creativity will always route around these kinds of attempts to constrain them. We are especially disappointed that the very governments that have traditionally supported a more balanced role in Internet governance are consciously and deliberately hosting massive Internet surveillance programs.”

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Tuesday 3/26/2013 ISOC-NY Event: “It’s the Web, Tim, but not as we know it”

island-colorOn Tuesday March 26 2013, at Thoughtworks NYC office, the Internet Society’s New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) will present “It’s the Web, Tim, but not as we know it” in which guest Michiel de Jong will explain unhosted, an open source solution for privacy and security in the cloud. The event is public, wheelchair accessible, and free.

The web started out as a platform for static documents. It then evolved into a platform for hosted software, that runs “in the cloud”, outside the user’s control. But html5 technology allows for a new option: “unhosted web apps”. Like documents, unhosted web apps are served as static content, which makes them cheap to publish. But like hosted software, they can have all the interactive functionality of a software application. In this new paradigm, the web is used to deliver the source code of the application, rather than delivering its user interface. Two years ago Michiel de Jong quit his day job as a scalability engineer, to work on free technology in exchange for donations. He now lives as a digital nomad and will be giving this talk remotely. This is a followup to the 2012 ISOC-NY/NYTECH event “New Techniques for Protecting Cloud Data and Security

What: “It’s the Web, Tim, but not as we know it
Where: Thoughtworks, 99 Madison Ave, 15th Floor (between West 29th and 30th Streets), New York NY 10016
When: Tuesday March 26 2013 6.30pm EDT
Webcast: will be recorded
Register: Either via our meetup page, or direct RSVP to David Solomonoff at president@isoc-ny.org
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Internet Society tutorial on managing your identity online.

© iStockphoto / Internet Society

Every time we log onto the web we access (and add to) our own personal digital footprint that’s interconnected with plug-ins, links, and massive caches of personal data that follows us around.

Learn About Your Digital Identity

While none of us can control everything that’s known about us online, there are steps we can take to better understand our online identities and be empowered to share what we want, when we want.

The Internet Society developed three interactive tutorials to help educate and inform anyone who would like to find out more.

Each lasts about 5 minutes and will give a great foundation when it comes to making informed choices about our unique online identities.

Watch The Tutorials

Tutorial 1: Online Identity – An Overview

Watch Module 1

This tutorial will explain some of the key differences between your online and “real life” identity, recognize the nature of digital identities, and understand the difference between online identity and personal privacy. Watch the tutorial now.

Tutorial 2: Protecting Your Privacy

Moduel 3

This tutorial will explain the key concerns related to online identity and privacy, recognize what kind of user information is collected and why, identify the ways of controlling the privacy of your online identity. Watch the tutorial now..

Tutorial 3: Protecting Your Identity

This tutorial will explain the challenges in protecting online identities and help you recognize the ways you can protect your online identity. Watch the tutorial now.

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Video: FreedomBox Hackfest February 2012

On February 18 2012 the Internet Society’s New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) participated in the first ever FreedomBox Hackfest, held at the Columbia School of Law in New York City. The FreedomBox is an initiative “to create a network of personal servers to protect privacy during daily life, maintain beachheads of free network access during times of political instability, and open lines of communication during natural disasters.” The project is a direct consequence of the “Freedom in the Cloud” talk that Eben Moglen gave two years, almost to the day, earlier for ISOC-NY.

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Cerf, Zittrain & Lessig talk @ Google

Jonathon Zittrain & Larry LessigBack in March, introduced by Vint Cerf, Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig gave a talk at Google’s Washington DC offices. Google has, possibly encouraged by its Viacom harassment, just posted the video up on YouTube. About 58 minutes in, after Zittrain has given his book synopsis – with which I trust we are all now familiar, Lessig, drawing on earlier ‘Z theory’, gets into the meat of exactly the privacy issues recently highlighted by Viacom’s actions.

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In Brief

  • CircleID reports on Vint Cerf’s views regarding Government’s Role in Internet Broadband Access: “Perhaps the Internet should be treated more like the road system. You don’t have multiple roads going to your house for example. Instead, it is a common resource.”
  • ars technica discusses how bandwidth caps could lead to ISPs benefiting from piracy. But they predict that the profits to be made from charging high bandwidth users a premium will also create an incentive for ISP’s to filter content suspected of copyright infringement. They also cover the recent survey results by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Internet and American Life project suggesting that the US broadband market is edging towards saturation. The study suggests that there are still significant untapped
    markets for broadband – but they would require significant investments in
    infrastructure or lowered prices. 14% of those surveyed said they simply couldn’t get broadband in their area. By contrast, British Telecommunications (BT) claims more than 99% of British households have access to broadband, although speeds remain an issue for those in rural areas.
  • Dan Brickley talks about how the recent court decision requiring Google to turn over YouTube user logs in the Viacomm infringement suit has broader privacy implications. With the Social Graph API, a new Google service, personal information from YouTube accounts that
    was already public is increasingly accessible to automated processing.

NJ court rules that IP addresses are private

A US court has ruled that users have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their internet surfing records and that police must obtain warrants from higher than usual courts in order to force ISPs to hand over records. However there was no requirement to inform the subject of such a request that it had been carried out.

The Supreme Court of the state of New Jersey said that information about a person’s use of the internet was so private that police there cannot order ISPs to release surfing details of suspects with a municipal court subpoena. They must receive a grand jury subpoena, it said. Continue reading

ISOC Initiatives 2008-2010

ISOC logoAt the December 2007 Board of Trustees meeting held in Vancouver, ISOC presented plans for 2008 to 2010. Key to those plans were a series of new, longer term, more strategic activities which will replace the traditional ‘pillar’ model describing activities in Standards, Public Policy, and Education. The new initiatives will focus on ‘Enabling Access‘, ‘InterNetWorks‘, ‘Trust & Identity‘ and ‘Standards & Technology‘. Continue reading

Mozilla Labs starts new project for deeper integration with online services

Chris Beard of Mozilla Labs announced a new project for “deeper integration of the browser with online services.” The goals include:

  • provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online services
  • ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services with freely available open standards-based tools
  • provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
  • respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
  • leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
  • build a extensible architecture like Firefox

This is an exciting and very necessary development for Mozilla. As personal data storage is moved from the desktop to the Net, client-side encryption is essential for privacy and security. It is inevitable that the companies offering web apps will suffer a shakeout and some will fold. And security breaches are a fact of online life.

I’m looking forward to integrating this into the ISubuntu project.

Fortune: Online chat ‘assistant’ may not be real

Fortune reports on chatbots used in online stores to talk potential customers out of abandoning their virtual shopping carts. “…A startup called UpSellit is … using live chat to act as a sales assistant …. but here’s UpSellit’s twist: That person on the other end of the live chat box isn’t a person at all. You’re chatting with software that’s designed to fool you into thinking it’s a person.” Clearly another step blurring the real and virtual that raises a few ethical and possibly legal questions. How would knowing that you’re talking to a bot change your attitude or behavior? What if you thought you were talking to a bot but it turned out be a real human being?

Court Ruling Protects Rights of Bloggers to Remain Anonymous

The anonymous blogger in question was a hospital employee in Paris, Texas who dished conditions at his workplace. Quoting from Public Citizen: “the requirement of presenting evidence provides an important measure of protection for employee whistleblowers and other anonymous critics of powerful corporations, political figures and others.”

Full Statement of Paul Alan Levy, Attorney With Public Citizen http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2566